Some buzz this morning about this year being the 200th anniversary of the end of the transatlantic slave trade. Congratulations USA. Of course the Brits had abolished the African trade in 1807 and enforced piracy laws that effectively ended the transatlantic trade for the US with or without a congressional resolution. The 1808 USian ban on the importation of slaves from Africa avoided conflict with Britain at sea, and postponed the War of 1812 a few years.
Neither the US nor Britain saw fit to end slavery when they banned the African trade. The USian solution was to step up slave breeding efforts. The US demand for slaves was met with the products of these breeding plantations from 1808 to 1865. Old South plantations that had depleted their soil growing cotton could turn to slave breeding for income while the cotton growing moved west to Texas.
One of the aspects of the Civil War that seems most cynical and/or ironic was the emancipation proclamation, freeing slaves in the Confederacy, but not speaking to emancipation of slaves in border states. On the other hand, the ratification of the 13th amendment to the constitution in 1865 occurred just three short years after the presidential order that set the Union on the path to freeing the slaves. This is an eye-blink in Government Time.
In 1860 there were about four million slaves in the United States. The vast majority of these were born into slavery in the USA (the transatlantic trade having effectively ended 52 years prior). Today, it’s estimated that of the 27 million slaves in the world, about 500,000 are in bondage in the USA. (CIA estimates of 17,000 slaves per year being brought into the country seem to support the half a million estimate).
Thanks for a great post. But let me point out that the figure of 27 million people in slavery does NOT come from iAbolish but from my book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (they often publish my work without giving me credit). If you would like to know more about modern slavery please visit our website: http://www.freetheslaves.net – there you can even see our new film about slavery in the US today – the film just won the Grand Prize at the Telluride Film Festival.
The good news is that we can bring slavery to an end in our lifetime – my new book, Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves, gives a solid plan involving governments, communities, the UN, relief organizations, and each one of us, to eradicate slavery forever. The book’s available on Amazon, our website, and just about everywhere else.
Many thanks
Kevin Bales
Kevin Bales calling this a “great post” is high praise. Thank you.
Probably my failure to properly attribute the 27 million figure to your book Disposable People was due to my own inadequate reading of the iAbolish site. A search of the site following your correction of my attribution yields this:
I look forward to reading Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves.
Minimizing labor costs on infrastructure projects, mining, and agriculture in the third world seems to be a driver for enslavement. I wonder how we can shine the light of public scrutiny on international corporations that use slaves (to build pipelines, for example), and on the private security companies that enforce enslavement? Perhaps you have already covered this in one of your books.